King Lear

King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, written around 1605-6, in which an ageing king divides his kingdom between the daughters who flatter him and disowns the one who loves him, unleashing chaos on family and state. It is set for HSC English Advanced Module B: Critical Study of Literature.

Old King Lear resolves to divide his kingdom among his three daughters and stages a love-test to apportion the shares. Goneril and Regan answer with lavish flattery; Cordelia, his favourite, will not compete, answering "Nothing, my lord", and is disowned, her portion split between her sisters and the loyal Kent banished for defending her. In the exactly parallel sub-plot, Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund turns his father against the legitimate Edgar, who flees disguised as the mad beggar "Poor Tom". Once in power, Goneril and Regan whittle away their father's retinue and dignity until the old king rushes out into a gathering storm and his daughters bar the doors behind him. On the heath his mind gives way, and exposed to the weather his poorest subjects endure, he feels for the first time the suffering he never saw as king. Gloucester's secret kindness to Lear is betrayed by Edmund, and Cornwall gouges out the old earl's eyes on stage; blinded, Gloucester learns at last that Edgar was true. Cordelia returns with a French army and finds her father, who wakes in her care confessing himself "a very foolish fond old man". But the British forces win the battle: Lear and Cordelia are captured, and Edmund secretly orders Cordelia's death. Though Edgar defeats his brother in a duel and Goneril and Regan destroy each other, the reprieve comes too late. Lear enters carrying Cordelia's body, breaks on "Never, never, never, never, never", and dies gazing at her lips, leaving the survivors to "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say".

The single most important word in King Lear is "nothing". The tragedy is set in motion when Cordelia refuses to perform her love - "Nothing, my lord" - and Lear insists that "Nothing will come of nothing." The word then tolls through the play as its whole action becomes a progressive reduction to nothing: Lear gives away kingdom, knights, shelter, sanity and daughter, until the play breaks on its most desolate line, five bare monosyllables, "Never, never, never, never, never."

The play turns on two rival meanings of nature. Lear appeals to the old, benign nature of ordained hierarchy and sacred family bonds, cursing his daughters' ingratitude as "sharper than a serpent's tooth"; against this Edmund sets a new, amoral nature of pure appetite, "Thou, Nature, art my goddess", a force that owes nothing to bonds and rewards only the strong. When Lear himself breaks the old order at the division, he lets Edmund's nature loose upon the world, and the storm is the natural order convulsing. Stripped bare on the heath, Lear glimpses what nature beneath rank really is: "unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal."

Structurally, the play is built on the paradox that we do not see until we are blind. Gloucester states it exactly once his eyes are gouged out: "I stumbled when I saw." Lear's inner blindness is cured by storm and madness, and brought low he sees the injustice his power had hidden - that authority is mere show, "a dog's obeyed in office", and that finery conceals corruption, "Robes and furred gowns hide all." Madness is the play's bitter clarity: the mad and the disguised speak truths the sane and powerful cannot, and the licence of "Poor Tom" and the Fool carries what plain speech would be punished for.

Above it all hangs the question of whether the universe is just. Gloucester reaches the darkest verdict - "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport" - and Shakespeare refuses to settle the case. Cordelia's death is the final test: Kent cries "Is this the promised end?", and the heavens do nothing. What comfort remains is human and stoic, not divine: "Ripeness is all."